Grey literature
According to the Oxford English Dictionary grey literature is "documentary material which is not commercially published or publicly available, such as technical reports or internal business documents." This includes technical and government reports, statistics, and social media outputs.
What is grey literature?
Non-commercially published materials including research reports, working papers, conference proceedings, theses, preprints, white papers, blogs, podcasts, social media posts, guidelines, policy documents, and reports from government, academia, business, and industry.
Why use grey literature?
- Access current/emerging research before formal publication
- Hear from diverse voices who may not have access to mainstream publishers
- Find studies with null or negative results (often unpublished in journals)
- Access information from government agencies, policy organizations, think tanks, NGOs, and professional bodies
Grey literature is not peer-reviewed, so quality varies. You need to use critical thinking skills to evaluate what you find.
Grey literature resource
Lens.org is freely available and covers patents, scholarly works, and biological sequence analysis. You can include or exclude countries and regions, and see how the documents have been cited in other people’s research.